A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Eric Bush The coronavirus has demonstrated that much of life is out of my control, but I do have the ability to choose how to spend my time. I’ve leveraged my new free time to return to some old hobbies and pick up a few new ones. In this post I will highlight how I’ve been spending my free time; if you enjoy any of these hobbies, I’d love to hear from you! Brewing Beer This is something I’ve wanted to try for some time. Now that I’m at home and no longer subjected to my apartment’s tiny kitchen, I decided to give this a try. I’m pleased to report that my first batch, which I’m calling the Apocalypse Amber Ale, turned out extremely well. Next up is a Bubonic Blueberry IPA, then a Pandemic Pilsner. Bottling day The first glass High Carb Cooking – From Scratch! I’ve also done lots of cooking, including making homemade bread and pasta. Both foods have amazingly few ingredients–flour, water, and eggs for pasta, and flour, water, sugar, salt, a...

By Kieran Weigal “Keep it simple!” Paolo told Will Randolph and me on our trip to Naples, Italy. We took a cooking course with Paulo, a Naples local who invited us into his home to share some of his experience and clear up some cooking misconceptions that many people have about Italian food. According to Paulo, spaghetti and meatballs are not widely consumed by Italians, and he had never even heard of chicken parmesan, which surprised us to say the least. The one thing however that stuck with me was his explanation of what true “Italian cooking is”–“Everybody thinks Italians have the best food because they use expensive ingredients and hand make everything from scratch, including their pasta. But that’s not how a local would cook. We use the same boxes of Barilla pasta and simple local ingredients to make food.” Simplicity over complexity. He showed us how to make a Neapolitan favorite: potato pasta, a dish we were quite skeptical of when he first mentioned it. “It’s past...

By Ashanti Scott Ashanti, I miss you so much. I miss when you could sit on the porch with an Arnold Palmer and talk to your family for hours without checking your phone or talking politics. Now you would rather sit in your room and watch Netflix alone and when we talk it’s all socialism, Marx and elections. I miss when you would procrastinate your schoolwork—but still get the A’s—because you would never miss a party or walk to the park. Now you shut away and “get ahead” to avoid social interactions. I miss when you would go fishing, roll around in the grass with the dogs, care for your rabbit, hike, be down for mudding. Now you are bougie and lift your nose at the thought of nature and if we aren’t talking car lots, the Simpsonville outlets, the Kate Spade store, Tiffany & co. or Louie Vuitton you don’t want to talk. I miss when you had that Southern slang mixed with a little twang. Now you use gargantuan idioms and synonyms. I miss when we’d travel to Fairmo...

By Noah Tillery It truly is a unique time. As we try to adapt to this new but temporary way of life, it becomes easier and easier to forget ourselves and fall prey to the violent currents of unprecedented change. If we wish to retain our sanity and happiness, and I think we all do, we cannot let this happen. We cannot become victims. And so, in an attempt to keep calm and reclaim our lives, I ask that you remember to be human. Now is the perfect time to return back to our normalcy in its original sense. I encourage us to go outside, to touch and hold and smell the dirt from which we came; to breathe the air that our lungs were designed to process; to watch the beasts over which we have dominion, observe their loftiness and their casualness, and note and appreciate their expertise of the ground on which they walk and the skies which they navigate; take the time to be alone as Adam first was, to think for yourselves without The Man on the Screen telling you about it--in fact, let us ...

By Claire Harmon When I arrived in my hometown in rural Western Kentucky just as the state was going into a full shutdown, I asked my dad if we could grow a vegetable garden. I’d been keeping some small houseplants in my dorm back in Louisville, and I loved the satisfaction that came from taking care of something and watching it grow. It also seemed like a good learning experience and something to do while I’m unable to leave the house. My parents were both taken aback by the request but assured me that if I was willing to put in the work, I could learn to grow just about anything I wanted. As a child, I never liked getting my hands or clothes dirty. I wanted everything to be clean and organized, so I can see why the idea of me weeding and raking and watering a garden would surprise my parents. As I’ve grown, though, I’ve started to feel that pull to be more connected with nature. I want to put my hands in the dirt; I want to look at the bugs and the worms; I want to fe...

By Sydney Finley In the year 2020, many things have kept me from slowing down. The wheels and gears in my brain never stop turning, and I find it difficult to just stop thinking for a few moments. Some days, I take pride in this; I work myself until the words on my computer screen look like alphabet soup. Other days, I am forcing myself to decompress and relax, even if it’s just for a few minutes. (I used to go to the on-campus Chick-Fil-A to grab an overpriced cookies and cream milkshake). It’s moments like those that prompt me to reflect on my time at the University thus far; however, the growing list of to-do’s and homework assignments quickly snap me back to my personal reality (notice that I said my personal reality). Considering the current state of the nation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, however, I recently made the executive decision to begin the process of deconstructing and rebuilding my outlook on academics and my personal “work schedule.” This process is absolut...

By Allison Boarman The coronavirus has taken over our phones for the last few weeks now. At least five new reports come up on my phone every single day, usually detailing the new number of cases in the United States or discussing the importance of social distancing. Of course, if you’re on social media, you also know that people are jumping on Twitter and Facebook more than ever to comment on articles, or to write about their own opinions during this time. The other day, one of the tweets that I came across really stuck out to me. It read, “This is our new normal.” Just that. For some reason, that particular tweet struck a chord in me. I was upset. No, this is not our new normal. We need to stop acting like it is. The United States pandemic team was fired two years before a massive pandemic struck the United States. Major politicians compared the coronavirus to the flu, all while the coronavirus was already killing the country’s citizens at an alarming rate. Doctors, n...

By Jakob Sherrard **Written before the COVID-19 Quarantine** “I cannot wait to get out of here.”- Every college student before leaving for college. After moving up to a city the size of Louisville and leaving behind my hometown of Elizabethtown I quickly began to learn a lot. A lot about myself, a lot about Louisville, and strangely enough a lot about my hometown. I realized that the place I strove to escape for the past few years of my life did have redeemable qualities that I failed to consider, and that I regretfully failed to appreciate while I was living there. Really it's the little things: solitude, nature, having family and familiarity readily available; things that you realize you appreciate the most when they’re not available at a moment’s notice. While, yes, not everyone feels the same way about their hometowns, I do ask that each of us stop and really cherish what our hometowns have given us. We are so driven by ambition that oftentimes we forget to stop a...

By Thomas Hulse In the McConnell Center, with political science to your left and to your right, you stand out when you say that your major is physics, and I have yet to hear a single positive thing said in response to that. Invariably, I’m given some sound of disgust followed by something about how they hated physics and pity me for going through it. And if that’s a poor reception, then the mathematics minor triggers a memory even more tragic for them to recollect. On the receiving side of this, I find it unencouraging to ceaselessly hear my passions dragged through the dirt every time it’s mentioned. And so, perhaps mathematics is in need of a defense: The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal. – Plato For all the time spent on the ponderings of the ancient Greeks, one preoccupation of theirs seems to pass under our modern radar: mathematics. Curious to us today, every classical philosopher was a clas...

FOR YOUR BOOKSHELF | Robert Lawson & Benjamin Powell's Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way through the Unfree World (Regnery Publishing, 2019) When I was asked to review a book for this newsletter, I was preparing for two reading groups for the fall semester at the University of Louisville. Each group would read three or four books, so I thought I would pick from one of them. Our first group read Cohen's Why not Socialism paired with Brennan's Why not Capitalism . These are cute takes on the two economic systems, but did not resonate well with the students. Their second book was Ben Powell's Out of Poverty . This is an interesting examination of sweatshops which shows that many workers prefer these jobs over their next best alternative. The second reading group read Jonathan Haidt and Gregg Lukianoff's The Coddling of the American Mind . They examine the causes for the oversensitive attitudes of today's college students and give soluti...